Sunday, August 27, 2017

Show of Hands Schadenfreude

Some things are more deservedly viral than others. This segment where the narrative gets away from CNN for instance. It appears Alisyn Camerota assembled a panel of Trump supporters for the purpose of affecting po-faced bemusement at each turn in their defense of Trump. I have a hard time believing she got anything other than what she expected; but she seems genuinely gobsmacked when not a one of them agrees the president's remarks about Charlottesville are an outrage.

Watching her encounter with the Trump supporters feels like coming upon the exact spot, the fault-line between proscribed values--the "narrative"--and objective constitutional principle. And it's the common man, not the elitist, counseling calm principle in the face of barely contained hysteria.

Camerota keeps putting it to them the way the media has been conditioning them to see it: when confronted with this question of guilt, it isn't who did what, but who is who.
They put it back to her at the level of (what used to be) middle-school civics: it's a question of who did what.

She's lucky nobody pins her down on this fundamental point. Comically at points she dances around it--the guy in the suit says something about antifa setting fires and Camerota corrects him. They didn't use "those tactics in Charlottesville".

Now, distinguishing between arson and assault (and of course one resourceful Angry Black Man did, notoriously, bring a homemade flamethrower) here is something for which she should probably still be receiving a logical beat-down, but she was bailed out by the black woman who--rightly--says "I blame the government".

Sure, she loses this exchange, after asking, with all the confidence of a Buzzfeed intern, "how do you blame the government for a white supremacist mowing down a crowd of people..."

There it is again. But what, she pleads, if it's a white supremacist...? In destroying your ability to think objectively, political correctness destroys your ability to see context.

So it seems not only is antifa allowed political violence if they oppose Nazis, the authorities are relieved of their duty to public safety--if it involves Nazis. The authorities don't have to protect Nazis, and they don't have to protect you from Nazis. They don't have to protect the Nazis from you.

In our minds the Nazis become like a force of nature; hey man, it's Nazis! What are you going to do? Nazis are like an Act of God. Nazis are sharks with laser beams attached to their heads.

Camerota is too conditioned to see she lobbies for a radical departure replacing individual rights with ideological guilt. She keeps asking in one form or another, comically, but these are Nazis, don't you get it?

It's heartening to see the clueless elite schooled by clued-in common folk.